What can stop Miley Cyrus from twerking? Maybe Russian sanctions

Miley Cyrus — the next casualty of the Crimea crisis? Sanctions could take a wrecking ball to the twerkin’ teen favorite’s sellout show in Helsinki, as the venue is owned by three Russians on the U.S. government’s blacklist, the Financial Times reports.

Cyrus’s performance in May, as well as a Justin Timberlake gig in June, was booked by U.S.-based Live Nation Entertainment
/quotes/zigman/402534/delayed/quotes/nls/lyvLYV. But the promoter could be blocked from completing payments to Hartwall Arena, unless it gets special clearance from the U.S. Treasury Department, legal experts said.

“If [Live Nation] still has to pay money for the use of the venue, that could be a problem,” Anthony Woolich, partner at law firm Holman Fenwick Willan, told the FT.

It all depends on the view U.S. authorities take of transactions arranged before the sanctions came in two weeks ago, but not yet fulfilled — that’s where the legal uncertainty lies, the lawyer noted.

Arena Events, the company that owns the Finnish stadium, belongs to three businessmen in the inner circle of Russian president Vladimir Putin: Gennady Timchenko, Arkady Rotenberg and Boris Rotenberg. All were put on a White House blacklist on 20 March, after Russia said it was annexing the breakaway Crimea region of Ukraine.

While the sanctions are meant to stop Americans from doing deals with businesses partly or wholly owned by those on the blacklist, murky ownership structures could make that tricky.

And if a U.S. company does toe the line on sanctions, that doesn’t mean there’ll be any comeback, Alexey Ulyukaev, Russia’s minister for economic development, told CNBC. While he criticized J.P. Morgan for halting payments from a Russian embassy, Ulyukaev said there are no plans for “symmetrical” retaliation. “We will not press the companies about something they were doing by some political pressure,” he said.

As for Live Nation, which has other U.S. stars set to appear in Helsinki, it’s now figuring out what to do next.

“We are currently reviewing our portfolio, and we will work to ensure the U.S. sanctions against the identified Russians are upheld,” the company told the FT.

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